A two-sided marketplace within the $100B+ sharing economy ShareRing has announced it has closed a AU$3.8 million capital raise. The seed funding round comes as ShareRing launches its Token Generation Event with an aim to issue four billion tokens, with a hard cap of USD$48 million (AU$62 million), through the sale of its utility token ShareToken (SHR).

Founded in 2017 by Australian co-founders, Tim Bos, Rohan Le Page, Peter David and Neville Christie, ShareRing is an on-demand platform that centralises the highly fragmented sharing economy by bringing together sharing services across all industries and geographies with avid, share economy users who can securely access, connect and pay for these services anywhere in the world.

Apart from Mr LePage, the team behind ShareRing is also the founding team of Keaz, a global leader in white label, car-sharing solutions that boasts over 300 car-sharing and vehicle mobility locations in its growing worldwide network, partnering with names such as Toyota, Telstra, Envoy and Merchants Fleet Management.

What is the story behind ShareRing?

The concept behind ShareRing was built on the founders’ vision to reduce global footprints and achieve greater social sustainability through a better utilisation of assets globally.

Tim Bos, co-founder of ShareRing, said: “The lightbulb moment for ShareRing came about when I was travelling through Japan and noticed the excessive amounts of hard rubbish collection along the streets. I realised just how much waste we produce as a massive consumerist society, and thought to myself, we can do better than this as a united global front if only we tapped into the real potential of the renting, borrowing and sharing community.”

“Powered by a custom-designed distributed blockchain called ShareLedger, technological limitations are what prevented the inception of ShareRing much sooner. It was not until the introduction and global scale of blockchain technology that we could carry out our vision and enable universal access to every asset attached to one, centralised system,” Mr Bos added.

ShareRing co-founder Tim Bos

The $3.8 million capital was raised from friend and family investors in six weeks and will be injected into building up ShareRing’s current development team, app development and its ongoing marketing strategy.

In regards to its Token Generation Event, ShareRing launched its private presale on March 5 2018 and has had requests totalling USD$10.8 million (AU$13.7 million) to date. Its public presale will open on March 19 2018, with the minimum contribution for presale participants set at USD$150,000 (AU$193,500).

Prior to the completion of the ShareLedger blockchain, the SHR token will be issued on the Ethereum blockchain using an ERC20 token standard and will be sold via a whitelist sale process, with a know your client (KYC) verification process for all contributions. ShareRing will also run a number of competitions and events in conjunction with its partners, including a Token Hunt and country specific competitions.

Mr Bos commented: “30 percent of the tokens will be spent incubating startups in the sharing economy. These will be directed straight into the startups themselves, as well as initiatives like pitch fests, because we want to grow and harness a strong, global, grassroots community around the sharing economy.”

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